Interior Secretary Gale Norton gave a keynote speech to a bioenergy conference Wednesday at the Hyatt Regency Denver at the Colorado Convention Center. She said she has spoken with President Bush about possible successors.

Washington – As she prepares to leave office, U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton is wading back into one of the thorniest issues in public lands management: What to do about road claims that cut across national parks, wildlife refuges and federal rangeland.

Norton will sign a “secretarial order” today telling her managers that if they determine such claims are valid, they can allow the county governments that claim them to send crews out to maintain them.

Environmental groups say Norton is handing over national treasures like Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument to pro-development county commissioners who want to open federal land to mining, drilling and off-road vehicles.

“It’s a proposal that will carve up these lands,” said Kirsten Brengel of the Wilderness Society. “Whoever replaces her as the Interior secretary is going to be left with a mess.”

Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne has been selected by President Bush to fill Norton’s post, subject to Senate confirmation.

Brengel said she’s especially worried that Norton’s ruling applies to national parks and wildlife refuges, which had previously been left out of the road-claims debate.

And they accuse Norton of slipping in an anti-environmental decision before she leaves office at the end of the month.

But Norton and Interior Department officials say she’s simply following the ruling handed down last year by a federal appeals court.

“These rights were created by act of Congress,” said Larry Jensen, intermountain regional solicitor for the Interior Department. “We can’t unilaterally deprive people of rights they may have.”

Interior officials said the policy emphasizes that federal land managers should strive to keep the status quo, and protect environmental values of the areas they manage, even if a road goes through it.

Norton’s order is the latest in a string of decisions dealing with what to do with roads created under a Civil War-era law called “R.S. 2477” that allowed local governments to create roads across federal lands.

Building a road across public land blocks land from being declared wilderness. That could open some land – such as areas administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, a division of the Interior Department – to mining, logging or gas drilling, critics allege.

In other places, such as parks, allowing a road could offer more opportunities for off-roading and other forms of recreation, sanctioned and unsanctioned.

Local officials, for example, have claimed 240 miles of roads inside Dinosaur National Monument, and 50 miles within Browns Park National Wildlife Refuge, according to figures provided by environmental groups. Roads have also been claimed inside national parks such as California’s Death Valley and Alaska’s Denali.

On the Front Range, property owners have found themselves in conflict with off-roaders who use the old routes to cut across their property.

Norton was pressed into making her policy public by the environmental groups, who’ve scheduled a conference call for today to criticize her proposed policy.

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